#WWWWednesday – 28th June 2023

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

---

Currently reading

The Blood of Others by Graham Hurley (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

A catastrophe no headline dared admit.

Summer 1942. Abwehr intelligence officer Wilhelm Schultz is baiting a trap to lure thousands of Allied troops to their deaths.

George Hogan is a devout young Canadian journalist who has caught the eye of press baron Lord Beaverbrook. Now he faces an assignment that will test both himself and his faith to breaking point.

Jackie Wrenne, meanwhile, is working in Lord Louis Mountbatten’s cloak-and-dagger Combined Operations headquarters and is privy to the boldest cross-Channel raid yet conceived.

Three lives interlinked by a name and a date that no Canadian will ever forget: Dieppe, 19 August 1942. At dawn, over six thousand men storm ashore on heavily defended French beaches. Barely hours later, less than half will make it back alive…

The Painter of Souls by Philip Kazan (Orion)

Beauty can be a gift…or a wicked temptation…

So it is for Filippo Lippi, growing up in Renaissance Florence. He has a talent – not only can he see the beauty in everything, he can capture it, paint it. But while beauty can seduce you, and art can transport you – it cannot always feed you or protect you.

To survive, Pippo Lippi, orphan, street urchin, budding rogue, must first become Fra Filippo Carmelite friar, man of God. His life will take him down two paths at once. He will become a gambler, a forger, a seducer of nuns; and at the same time he will be the greatest painter of his time, the teacher of Botticelli and the confidante of the Medicis.

So who is he really – lover, believer, father, teacher, artist? Which man? Which life? Is anything true except the paintings?

An extraordinary journey of passion, art and intrigue, The Painter of Souls takes us to a time and place in Italy’s history where desire reigns and salvation is found in the strangest of places.

---

Recently finished

The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

Banyan Moon by Thao Thai (Quercus) 

---

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Para Bellum by Simon Turney (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

AD 381. Five years have gone by since a Roman governor ordered the deaths of a Gothic king and his attendants at a feast in their honour. This disastrous act led to warfare in the Roman Empire and the death of the Emperor Valens.

Now, the Empire is calm once more, but for the eight legionaries who committed the killings, the bloodshed is only just beginning. Fritigern, brother of the murdered king, has sworn revenge on his brother’s killers. Now king of a powerful Gothic tribe, he will not rest until the men are hunted down.

Flavius Focalis is one of those legionaries. Surviving an attack at his villa, he realises the danger he and his family are in, and seeks to warn his former comrades, for he knows Fritigern will give them no quarter. So begins a deadly game of cat-and-mouse across the Empire, as, by land and sea, the former soldiers face the wrath of their implacable enemy, and return to the scene of the greatest battle of their Adrianople. For war is coming again – and the only question is, do they die now, or die later?